“How long,” she raged, “have you been sitting there cursing me?”
“Not been cursing, Miriam. You’ve been interesting, no end. But there’s a thing, Miriam, an awful thing called tomorrow morning.”
“Is it late?” The appalling, the utter and everywhere appalling scrappiness of social life. …
“Not for you, Miriam. We’re poor things. We envy. We can’t compete with your appetite, your disgraceful young appetite for late hours.”
“Things always end just as they’re beginning.”
“Things end, Miriam, so that other things may begin.”
She roused herself to give battle. But Alma drifted between, crying gaily that there was tomorrow. A good strong tomorrow. Warranted to stand hard wear.
“And turn; and take a dye when you’re tired of the colour.”
He laughed, really amused? Or crediting her with an attempt to talk in a code?
“A tomorrow that will wear forever and make a petticoat afterwards.”
He laughed again. Quite simply. He had not heard that old jest. Seemed never to have heard the old family jests. Seemed to have grown up without jests. … Tomorrow, unless no one came, would not be like today.
The morning offered a blissful eternity before lunch. She had wakened drowsy with strength and the apprehension of good, and gone through breakfast like a sleepwalker, playing her part without cost, independent of sight and hearing and thought. Successful. Dreamily watching a play, taking a part inaudibly dictated, without effort, seeing it turn into the chief part, more and more turned over to her as she lay still in the hands of the invisible prompter; withdrawn in an exploration of the features of this state of being that nothing could reach or disturb. If, this time, she could discover its secret, she would be launched in it forever.
Back in her room she prepared swiftly to go out and meet the day in the open; all the world, waiting in the happy garden. … Through the house-stillness sounded three single downward-stepping notes … the first phrase of the seventh symphony. … Perfect. Eternity stating itself in the stillness. He knew it, choosing just this thing to play to himself, alone; living in space alone, at one with everybody, as everyone was, the moment life allowed. Beethoven’s perfect expression of the perfection of life, first thing in the morning. Morning stillness; single dreaming notes that blossomed in it and left it undisturbed; moved on into a pattern and then stood linked together in a single perfect chord. Another pattern in the same simple notes and another chord. Dainty little chords bowing to each other; gentle gestures that gradually became an angelic little dance through which presently a song leapt forth, the single opening notes brought back, caught up and swept into song pealing rapturously out.
He was revealing himself as he was when alone, admitting Beethoven’s vision of life as well as seeing the marvellous things Beethoven did with his themes? But he liked best the slamming, hee-hawing rollick of the last movement. … Because it did so much with a theme that was almost nothing. … Bang, toodle-oodle-oodle, Bang, toodle-oodle-oodle, Bang toodle-oodle-oodle-oo. A lumpish phrase; a Clementi finger exercise played suddenly in startling fortissimo by an impatient schoolboy; smashed out with the full force of the orchestra, taken up, slammed here and there, up and down, by a leaping, plunging, heavy hoofed pantaloon, approving each variation with loud guffaws. … The sly swift dig-in-the-ribs of the sudden pianissimos. …
To watch a shape adds interest to listening. But something disappears in listening with the form put first. Hearing only form is a kind of perfect happiness. But in coming back there is a reproach; as if it had been a kind of truancy. … People who care only for form think themselves superior. Then there is something wrong with them.
On the landing table a letter lay waiting for the post. She passed by, gladly not caring to glance. But a tingling in her shoulders drew her back. She had reached the garden door. The music now pouring busily through from the next room urged her forward. But once outside she would have become a party to bright reasonableness, a foolish frontage, caricatured from behind. She fled back along her path to music that was once more the promise of joy … to read the address of one of Alma’s tradespeople, a distasteful reminder of the wheels of dull work perpetually running under the surface of beauty. But this morning it would not attain her. … It was not Alma’s hand, but the small running shape like a scroll, each part a tiny perfection. She bent over it. Miss Edna Prout. … This, then, was what she had come back to find; poison for the day. The house was silent as a desert; empty, swept clear of life. The roomful of music was in another world. Alone in it, he had written to her and then sat down, thinking of her, to his music.
Complications are enlivening. … Within the sunlight, in the great spread of glistening sea, in the touch of the free air and the look of the things set down on the bench there was a lively intensity. A demand for search; for a thought that would obliterate the smear on the blue and gold of the day. The thought had been there even at the moment of shock. The following tumult was the effort to find it. To get round behind the shock and slay it before it could slay. To agree. That was the answer. Not to care. To show how much you care by deliberately not caring? People show disapproval of their own actions by defending
